How I Learned Piano from Soccer Practice

By: Aaron Zimmerman

Soccer practice started with stretches.  Then small__5257670808we would run, followed by basic skills like dribbling, passing.  Next, game simulations, where we walked through game-like situations slowly.  At the end if there was time, we would scrimmage (split up into two teams and play).

Many students don’t really know how to practice piano. Unlike soccer, students usually only interact with their coach for a short period of time, once a week.  It is logical to simply perform the activities the teacher asks for in lessons, which is usually “play the piece”.  This is like learning to play soccer by just scrimmaging.  But scrimmaging is only one part of practicing.

Practice is the mindful repetition of isolated aspects of a challenge.

If you spent all soccer practice scrimmaging, you would gradually pick up the basic skills, but there would be a low ceiling on your improvement.  Some of the skills are simply too complicated to learn while your mind cannot focus entirely on them.  Piano is the same, and while a student is learning easy material, performance practicing is usually enough to learn a piece of music.  As their technique progresses, they will find performance practice increasingly frustrating, it will take a longer and longer to learn music, and often, the student decides the it is no longer fun and quits.

Students need to practice practicing.

When practice is framed as something different than performing, it is fun in its own way.  It is a puzzle to be solved, a mystery to be explored.

The below steps are also available here in a condensed handout form.

Steps to Effective Practice:

1: Warm Up 

This cannot be overstated.  Without warming up much of your practice is wasted.   Playing the piano is an athletic activity, it takes muscle control and stamina.  Piano technique is a unique use of the fingers, and before warming up, fingers are uncoordinated and sloppy.  This leads to making mistakes when you otherwise wouldn’t, and practicing mistakes is one of the worst habits of piano practice.  The exact method of warming up isn’t as important.  I usually suggest scales, improvising, or specific technique exercises.

2: Practice one thing at a time

Music is delightfully multi-dimensional.  At any given moment the pianist has to contend with harmony, melody, rhythm, and more.  When practicing, isolate each of these and practice one at a time.

  • Isolate the melody, playing it by itself, even as it crosses hands.

  • Isolate rhythm by clapping and counting the rhythms, or tap both hands on your lap, each following their own rhythm.

  • Isolate harmony by playing all of the notes in a measure at once.  The left hand is often a chord, so it is somewhat easy, but do it for the right hand also.  And do it in time, counting the measure and moving the hand to the next group of notes.

  • In music that has multiple melodies, such as a hymn, a fugue, a countermelody, isolate each of these voices.  Learn how they move, what they sound like, or they will lose their identity when layered with the rest of the piece.

  • As practicing progresses, isolate more complicated passages.  Start a measure before the problem area, and play until a measure after (these are usually awkward places to start and stop, that’s ok).

3:  Practice slowly, slower, and then finally, slow

Even when isolating elements, there is still a lot going on.  You have to go slowly and not make mistakes.  Making mistakes is counter productive, you are learning incorrectly, reinforcing the wrong muscle movement.  Find the hardest part of the piece, and go as slow as you need to to play that passage without a single mistake.  Metronomes are often very helpful in this, they will keep you honest (it is tempting to let yourself speed up).

4 : Get into the flow

Practicing really takes off when you let go and get into the moment.  This is the most abstract part of practice, but no less important for that.  It is like the feeling of swimming, before you start getting tired, but after your muscles stop complaining about the swim.  It is a very peaceful, zen like feeling.

To get there, I put pressure on myself to not make mistakes.  One way is imposing some kind of penalty for a mistake, like 5 pushups, on every mistake.  Another way is putting 5 pennies or similar on one side of the piano.  Every time a difficult passage is played successfully, a penny is slid across.  On a mistake, all of the pennies return to the starting positions.  Upon all pennies being slid (so, 5 times without a mistake), you move on to the next passage.

This raising of the stakes brings a focused intensity to your practice.  It forces you to really concentrate and not make mistakes.  For me, this leads to losing myself in the moment, to looking up and realizing that i’ve been playing the same passage for 15 minutes.  It is a very pleasant realization.

5:  Other suggestions

  • Write in finger numbers, and use the same fingers every time

  • Practice a piece back to front (in phrases)

  • Write everything down.  ”don’t make this too loud”, circle problematic passages, label chords and and write in beats.    (One side note, I usually don’t write in accidentals found in the key signature as I want students to learn to play in a key.  Rather, I’ll create an eyeglass symbol to remind them that there is something tricky about that measure.)

  • Practicing 15 minutes every day is much better than practicing 2 hours once a week.

What children find the most rewarding is accomplishment.  If they come to see practice as its own kind of skill to be learned, they will find much more joy in it, and they will do it more.  And it makes the scrimmaging, the performing, all the sweeter.

 

photo credit: Keoni Cabral via photopin cc

2 thoughts on “How I Learned Piano from Soccer Practice

  1. Deborah Fortier

    Everything put forth here is good and healthy and useful, and, except for the warming up part (I tend to neglect that), I use with my students. 2 things to add: sometimes I take a passage out of rhythm to make an exercise out of it, or make a new exercise out of it, if the student is struggling physically with it and 2) instead of the pennies I implement the “no mistake method”, which simply means that once a mistake is made, one has to go back to the beginning. If strictly enforced (& this can apply to fingering, rhythm, dynamics, etc besides just notes), this stops a student from making the mistake before they make it. And believe it or not, they like it, and of course, it does get results. I make sure that the goal is do-able as, for example, just one phrase, or one section 3 x (or 1 x, or 10 x) without a mistake (at the final time on the last note a mistake is made, I still have them go back to 1st x around). The sports analogy is always good, especially considering how sports-minded people are these days. I say: “If a basketball player gets the ball in the basket, does he then say, “ok I’m good”, and walk away? No, they do it over and over and over, from all places and under all conditions.

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